


By Any Other Name

by havisham



Category: Titanic (1997)
Genre: 1920s, F/M, Ficlet, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/pseuds/havisham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She's a creature of adaptation.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Ladies of Period Drama Comment Ficathon.

In New York, she was fed soup and told that she could keep the blanket. With a few dollars stuffed in her hand, she was bid farewell and godspeed. Her teeth didn’t stop chattering until she had spent a week or so on land. She knew that nothing would warm her again. 

If she closed her eyes she could still see them -- the frozen faces of the dead overlaid by the opulence of the ship -- and she reminded herself that she _chose_ this. And when her hands roughened and began to crack and bleed from scrubbing floors, she grit her teeth and went on. She had chosen not to go back. 

Her name was on the list of the dead, and her mother threw her an extravagant wake, burning through the last of their old fortune by doing so. Cal found another fiancee, a fragile looking woman with fair hair and a lost expression. Their engagement was the talk of the gossip pages. 

(It was so soon after her death.But then again, Cal had never been afraid to look callous.) 

Rose wanted to save her, Cal’s new fiance, but really, she could only save herself now. 

\+ 

Finally, she made enough for a train ticket to California. The country unfurled before her like an map, and her finger followed the line that takes her away from New York and her past, to the West, and the future. 

The third-class carriage was stuffed, and her map is crumped but she doesn’t mind, not a bit. She played with her neighbor’s baby, the afternoon sun lighting up her red hair into a halo. This was how Tom first saw her, and his romantic mind was ablaze with images of the Madonna and child, bathed in heavenly light. 

She muffled her laughter when he told her this, in a bar in some one-horse town just west of the Rockies. “Don’t romanticize me,” she said to him and he grinned, black hair falling over his eyes. He was going to California too -- Los Angeles, he said, to be a part of the movies. He wants to be a cameraman. 

“You want to make Nickelodeons?” she wrinkled her nose a little, she had never been allowed to see them of course, such places weren’t proper for young ladies of good family, and well, afterward, she didn’t have a nickel to spare. 

“Of course,” he said, his voice straining with effort. He wasn’t from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, but Saint Paul, Minnesota, and he would be offended if she should get the two places confused. (He had never heard of Chippewa Falls, for one.) 

He was nothing like Jack, except for the fact the he was, a little. 

His hand brushed against hers, and there was a promise in his eyes that she found that she quite liked. Later, when he was pressed against her and murmured into her ear that she was beautiful, and perfect, and that he would marry her tommorrow. She smiled and ignored him. 

Love wasn’t what she was looking for, not now. 

In the morning, she bid him farewell, and took the next train to Los Angeles. 

\+ 

She got a job scrubbing floors (again, she hated it) but then the war came and she toyed with the idea of taking up nursing. But instead, she caught someone’s eye and she landed on the stage -- playing to crowds of soldiers -- roles in _The Sweetheart You Left Behind_ and _The Rose of Los Angeles._ Even when the war ended, she kept getting jobs, in silent pictures, and then the talkies. 

She moved easily from an ingenue to a sexpot to the world-weary woman. 

She wondered sometimes if her mother recognized her in one of these movies, but of course, her mother would never been seen dead in a movie-theater. 

She meet John Calvert in a party in the Hollywood hills. He couldn’t dance -- he has a limp, a souvenir from the war, no doubt -- but he watched her as she danced with an ironic lift of his lips. He introduced himself as a fan of hers and she accepted his proffered flute of champagne. 

Sipping at her champagne, she asked, “And what do you like about my work, Mr. Calvert?” 

He smiled and said, “Why, your face, Miss Dawson. I’m utterly captivated.” 

“Indeed? It’s Mrs. Dawson, actually. I’m a widow.” 

His face fell, he looked better grim than he did smiling. She wondered if she should tell him, one day. He said, “You lost him in the war?” 

Her answer was cagey, but not untrue. “A little bit before, actually. But that’s true enough -- I could have lost him in the war.” 

Jack is a bright, distant memory. He saved her life, it was true, but that only meant that now she had to live it. The shouts of the crowd grew louder as the countdown began. the hour lapsed and it was a new year (1929) and Rose Dawson has confetti in her hair and stars in her eyes. A photography bulb went off, and the moment was frozen in time, forever. 

Perfect.


End file.
